The essays that I’ve composed so far are concerned with the meaning, importance, and act of speech. As I prepare to compose a video essay, I’ve stumbled on an interesting question: is it possible to create a visual essay that is devoid of speech? Can an essay retain its reflective and exploratory qualities without a narrator to guide its movements?

In Nick Twemlow’s contributor’s note to “Wolfvision,” Twemlow suggests “that images are a lot like words…”  in that using videos and images uploaded on the internet should be available to everyone. He then describes a photography graduate student who marked not books, but television shows as his greatest influences because “the image for him, superseded the written word.” Twemlow uses this example to wonder “why we can’t ask that images become building blocks of our cinematic grammar, much like words work for writers.” Twemlow avoids an absolute assertion that images are synonymous with words, but he appears to wish that images would become another language.

This desire reminded me of “Autopsy Report” and Lia Purpura’s act of looking when she was a child: “by seeing I called to things, and in turn, things called to me, applied me to their sight and we became each as treasure, startling to one another and rare” (7). Purpura’s “seeing” was treasured and startling because language, as she knows it now, was unattached. Seeing and encountering these objects was “ineffable” (7). Looking was sacred because language was unassociated, looking transcended language. This, I think, is what Twemlow desires for images in cinema. He wants the image to be sacred and shared. But therein lies the problem. In order for an image, according to Purpura, to be sacred, it must be ineffable; it cannot be shared. As soon as the image is named anything, the image’s meaning is constrained; it is no longer sacred.

This is not to say that Twemlow believes that images are sufficient in a video essay; he uses narration in “Wolfvision” to frame the viewer’s experience. But, I think that his desire for images to become like a language doesn’t grapple with reality: by making anything a language, it must be made common and effable; it must be defined using either textual or verbal language.

And so I think narration is necessary in a video essay. Images are evocative and affecting in an infinite number of ways. For the essayist who wants to explore a single topic—and not the infinite paths different minds may take when interpreting images without words—narration must contextualize the images used in a video essay.  This means abandoning an image’s sacredness and beautiful ineffability and choosing to re-contexualize an image’s meaning for the viewer so that although the image loses its sacredness, it avoids becoming common and effable.